There are many situations in which one person wishes to send another person a gift on a regular basis. One such situation occurs when families are forced by circumstances to live at separate locations. Thus, a parent, or in a more common scenario, a grandparent, living remote from a grandchild might want to be in communication with his/her child or grandchild on a regular basis.
Currently, such communication can be by phone conversation (verbally or by text), by e-mail, pen and paper, social networking (such as Facebook). For the most part these communications tend to be one-off, in that each is an independent act and requires one or both parties to have the mental or physical capabilities to communicate in this fashion. Certainly, some people are better at such communication than are others.
However, many situations exist where the remote parent/grandparent/friend wishes to be in periodic communication with a loved one but find it difficult, for one reason or another, to connect on a satisfying communication medium. One inhibiting factor often is the fact that the potential initiating person (initiator) does not know what content is age (or situation) appropriate for the recipient.
Professionals are in the business of creating media content that is age (or situation) appropriate. Such media comes in the form of games, videos, magazines and internet postings (such as blogs). These media formats have a universal trait, namely, they are common (and thus impersonal) across the age (or situation) group to whom they are designed to resonate with. For example, assume a grandparent wishes to send a magazine to a seven year old grandchild. Two problems exist. First, what magazine is appropriate for that age group? This problem is solvable with a bit of research and perhaps conversation with the recipient or with the recipient's guardians. But then the problem arise that the magazine will arrive monthly and while it might make a great gift, it is not necessarily connected to the initiator. Thus, in situations where the initiator wishes to establish a connection (or bonding) with the recipient, an impersonal gift of the month (such as a magazine subscription) is hardly the proper vehicle.